Crimson Butterflies
by ParadiseAvenger
Summary: MOVED! Naru stepped forward towards the torii gate, his eyes on something no one could see. "The Ritual..." He walked towards the gate, passing Ayako without a word even as she called out to him. "The twins who will become the sacrifice have returned!" NaruXMai. (20 Chapters.) MOVED!


So, at this point, everyone knows that I was forced to remove Lemon Island and its mature content due to the Eliminator Forum vicious attacking and trolling me. I'm going to move ALL my mature stories to a new website. If you're just as sick of this as I am, please join our cause to bring freedom back to Fanfiction!

**Avenger Forum link, remove spaces and *:** www. fanfiction. n*e*t /forum/Avenger/119079 (All information can be found in the Supporter forum.)

**The Rebellion Forum link, remove spaces and *:** www. fanfiction. n*e*t /forum/The-Rebellion/114259/ (Most forums are banding together here.)

**Petition for an MA rating link, remove spaces and *:** www. change. o*r*g /petitions/fanfiction-net-we-want-fanfiction-to-create-a-ma-rating

…

Anyway, I have **MOVED** this story **COMPLETELY** to another site. You can find this **STORY** and all its subsequent **UPDATES **here: h*t*t*p :/archiveofourown. o*r*g /works/718029/chapters/1330228

I have the same penname there as I do here: ParadiseAvenger

**May 21, Night**

Taniyama Mai returned to her senses suddenly and sharply. She had been sleeping in her bed after coming home from work at Shibuya Psychic Research, she was certain of that. Yet… she was standing in a dark forest, alone. The air was cool and the glimpses of the sky she could see peering through the canopy was pitch-black. It was night, deep dark night. Leaves and twigs crunched under Mai's feet as she followed the path through the forest.

"_Didn't we always promise each other… that we would be together?"_

There was distant flame-like glow through the trees, like a small village was hidden away in the dense forest. Mai continued walking, her heart pounding wildly in her chest. She felt short of breath, as if she had been running, and cold with a sense of loss. She reached a crooked red torii gate (1) and hesitated, staring up at it. Why did she feel that if she crossed beneath it she would never be able to come back? She took a step forward, but caught a glint of crimson light from the corner of her eye.

"_I'm sorry… I'm so sorry…"_

Mai turned her gaze away from the fluttering crimson shape. There was a young woman in a white kimono standing at just inside the crimson torii gate, her head bowed, her arms wrapped tightly around her shoulders. She was crying, her voice plagued with agony and sorrow. She sounded as if she had lost everything that was important to her. Mai took a step closer, hoping to get a look at the young woman's face or even speak to her, but the small blood-colored light returned.

It was a butterfly—a crimson butterfly.

Mai followed the flying insect with her eyes, watching it flit off into the dark forest until it came to rest on a small knee-high stone statue of the Twin Shrine Maidens holding hands. The butterfly took flight again, fluttering towards the distant glow through the trees where it vanished among the flame-colored light. Mai turned back to look at the torii gate and the woman in the white kimono, but the young woman was gone. Only the twisted warped shape of the crimson gate remained.

"Hello?" Mai called, her voice was soft in the silence. Then, a maelstrom of voices and images assaulted her, lashing and whirling through her mind and heart. They tore her breath away, chilled her blood, and swallowed her whole.

"_I'm sorry… I'm so sorry…"_

_The girl in the white kimono, standing at the torii gate, crying…_

"_The Crimson Sacrifice!" _

_A Veiled Priest in black tearing off his veil in time to see something rise from Hell…_

"_Kill me!"_

_Hands closing around a thin throat, pale face gazing up at her…_

"_Don't kill me!"_

_Two young girls standing together, holding hands…_

"_Everyone… died."_

_There was a red torii gate in darkness, a crimson rope hanging from it…_

"_I was killed… by the priests…" _

_There were crimson butterflies everywhere, filling the sky…_

Mai screamed and the sound woke her harshly, echoing against the walls of her bedroom. She was in her own bed, tangled in the sheets. She was panting for breath, her skin cold with sweat and she couldn't get in a deep enough breath to sustain her lungs. She clutched the sheets to her heaving chest and glanced out the window at the dark night beyond the glass. "What was… that?" she whispered, but she wasn't certain she wanted to know.

**The Next Day, Noon**

The case came in on Mai's day off so she never had a chance to tell Naru about her dream.

People in the remote village of Kaman kept reporting the young woman in a white kimono standing at a crooked torii gate in the middle of the mountain forest, sobbing. She never hurt anyone. She wasn't a dangerous spirit, but no one knew who she was or why she was just standing there, crying and apologizing.

But the entire forest was due to be swallowed up by a lake once the Minakami Dam was built at the end of the summer and the people living nearby in the village of Kaman just wanted her spirit to rest in peace before she was buried forever beneath the water. They didn't know what else to do for her. They had no idea who she was, after all.

It was rumored that she might have been a ghost from the village that had vanished over a hundred years ago in the forest, but no one knew for certain. In fact, no one could even find records of the village's existence save urban legends, ghost stories, and the single torii gate where the young woman in white cried.

The only strange thing about the forest was that people disappeared from the area of the crooked torii gate with some frequency. Occasionally, someone who had been missing for nearly a week would return, stumbling through Kaman Village with snow white hair. It was strange, but no bodies were ever recovered from the forest. Something unexplainable was going on in the forest in the region of the gate.

Even so, it was supposed to be a simple exorcism.

Shibuya Kazuya, also known as Naru the Narcissist, wasn't going to take the case originally, even though the mayor of the small rural town of Kaman nearly begged him. Takigawa Houshou arrived at lunch time to see Mai, but had forgotten that it was Mai's day off, just in time to catch the tail end of the case and the mayor's pathetic begging.

"Ne, Naru-chan," the monk said as he sat down on the couch across from Naru and adjacent to the mayor. "I've heard about that place."

Naru sighed heavily. "Everyone has, Bou-san. It's the same legend of the Sugisawa Village. (2) The legend says that one man massacred the entire village before killing himself, but no records of this ever happening exists. The area that was once Sugisawa Village has been incorporated into another village and all traces of it erased."

The mayor of Kaman gasped.

Bou-san didn't look all that surprised. Naru seemed to always know everything.

"The legend also bears resemblance to the Tsuyama Massacre," Naru continued, "which took place May twentieth and twenty-first in 1938. (3) Mutsuo Toi, at age twenty-one after being diagnosed with tuberculosis, cut the electricity to his village of Kaio, leaving the community in total darkness. He then killed at least thirty people in the village, over half of the small population, before committing suicide at dawn."

Naru meet the mayor's eyes first and then Bou-san's.

"Rumors like this are not uncommon," he said firmly. "I will not take this case."

Bou-san's lips pulled in a smile. Naru was such a narcissistic know-it-all, but for once the monk knew something the teenager didn't. "I've heard that, too, Naru, but I think there's something about this place that bears mentioning."

Naru glared at him. "What?"

"The twins," Bou-san said.

Naru's glacial eyes widened just a fraction. "What?"

Lin's fingers froze over his keyboard. The loss of the endless tap-tap-tap of the keys in the silence of the SPR office was unnerving, but it only lasted a moment before Lin returned to his typing. But the Chinese man's reaction puzzled the monk. Normally, Lin was as emotionless and calm as a butterfly, but for him to completely stop his endless typing… What was it about twins that had given him (and Naru) such a start?

"You should tell him," Bou-san said to the mayor. "Surely you know. I heard about it when I was still on Mount Kouya."

The mayor hesitated. "Well…"

Naru was getting impatient. "What is it?"

"We had a single set of twins born in Kaman," the mayor said softly. "When they were in their teens, they went into the forest and disappeared. For days we searched for them without ever finding a trace of what had happened to them. Then, one day, one of the twins just walked back into the village. His hair had turned snow-white and he had a red mark like a butterfly on his throat. No trace of the other twin was ever found and the one who returned wouldn't speak of what had happened. A few days after his return, he committed suicide."

Naru glanced at the monk, suspicious. "Has anything else strange involving twins happened?"

The mayor dabbed at his sweaty forehead with his sleeve. "I'm not sure. I just know what happens in Kaman."

Naru chewed the inside of his cheek, thinking a moment. Then, he glanced at Bou-san and then back to the mayor before glancing at Lin's back. The man had resumed his typing and was not paying attention to anything else. "Alright," Naru said finally. "We'll take the case."

**X X X**

(1) A torii gate is a red Shinto Shrine gate for those of you that don't know.

(2) It is rumored that the legend of the Sugisawa Village was the inspiration for Fatal Frame 2.

(3) The Tsuyama Massacre did actually take place just as I described it. Creepy, right?

And I removed the original mature content that continued from that point due to the trolls. Please join the cause to bring maturity to Fanfiction again. Or read this story and all its updates in its original version on Archive of Our Own.


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